1940
Churchill: the Prime Minister who would not surrender
Around the start of the Second World War, Germany's Adolf Hitler occupied Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland. Next he took Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1940 German forces beat the Allied armies and swept through France. At this moment of great danger for the country, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and led Britain in the war.
Churchill (1874–1965) was the son of a politician. He had been a soldier and a newspaper reporter, and in 1900 he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative. He became Prime Minister in May 1940. He would not give in to the Nazis, and he gave the whole country courage at its hardest moment. People still quote his wartime speeches today:
“… nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat”
In plain words: this will be very hard, and all I can promise is hard work and sacrifice. ("Toil" means hard work.)
“We shall fight on the beaches … we shall never surrender”
In plain words: even if the enemy lands in Britain, we will keep fighting and never give up.
“… so much owed by so many to so few”
In plain words: never in any war have so many people owed so much to such a small group, the pilots of the RAF.
What happened to him after the war also comes up in the test. Churchill lost the general election in 1945, but he was back as Prime Minister in 1951. He stayed an MP until the 1964 general election, and when he died in 1965 he was given a state funeral. In a public vote in 2002, the British chose him as the greatest Briton of all time.
His road to the top was not a straight one. He did become a Conservative MP in 1900, but in 1904 he crossed over to the Liberals, and only went back to the Conservatives twenty years later. He is supposed to have joked: "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat" ("to rat" means to desert your side), though where the line really comes from is not certain. He also wrote many books of history and memoirs, and in 1953 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, not the Peace Prize.
Quiz
Which TWO statements about Winston Churchill are correct?
Churchill became a Conservative MP in 1900 and was voted the greatest Briton in 2002. He lost the 1945 general election, which was won by Labour's Clement Attlee. The Prime Ministers during the First World War were H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, not Churchill.